The contemporary term false flag describes covert operations
that are designed to deceive in such a way that activities appear as
though they are being carried out by entities, groups, or nations other
than those who actually planned and executed them.

A recent article at the Daily Beast asks whether a terror attack at the World's Fair in 1940 was designed to get the United States involved in WWII.

On June 4, 1940, Nazi Germany shoved the last British troop off the
Continent at Dunkirk. Adolf Hitler moved his forces into position for a
final cross-Channel invasion and occupation of England. That same month
the new British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, dispatched a
shadowy figure, Sir William Stephenson—later most famous as the original of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Agent 007—to
set up a spy shop for Britain’s MI6 in Midtown Manhattan. A hero of
World War One and self-made multi-millionaire, Stephenson was on neutral
ground in America, but he and Churchill shared the conviction that
nothing was more important to their nation’s chances for survival than
winning American supportfor the war against Hitler. Then, on July 4,
1940, with throngs of holiday visitors at the New York World’s Fair, a
time bomb planted in the British Pavilion exploded, instantly killing
two New York City policemen and badly mauling five others. Was
Stephenson behind the blast in an attempt to frame Nazis and their
American sympathizers? Were these officers sacrificed to win American
sympathy and draw a reluctant United States into the Second World War?

The article is inconclusive and presents no new evidence. Posted because we are again in an era where everyone needs to be aware of the possibility of false flags with regard to both international and domestic terrorism.

The woman went to her doctor and admitted she’d bought a tapeworm off
the Internet and swallowed it, says Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, the medical
director of the Iowa Department of Public Health...

Quinlisk says that the capsules sold in the past by snake oil
hucksters, and online today, likely contain the microscopic head of a
Taenia saginata.

“When people would order from snake oil medicine kinds of
people a weight loss pill, it would be the head of a Taenia saginata …
and it would develop into a 30-foot-long tapeworm in your body,”
Quinlisk says. “The worm would get into your gut – it’s got little hooks
on the head – and it would grab onto your intestine and start growing.”

Pretend for a moment that you’re walking through your neighborhood
and notice a line of people wrapped around the block outside a newly
opened restaurant. Local food bloggers haven’t written about the
venue, so you assume the trendy-looking crowd must be the result of
contagious, word-of-mouth buzz.

There was a time when that may
have been undoubtedly true — when you could trust that a crowd of people
was, in fact, a naturally occurring mass of individuals.

But
that time may be passing thanks to Surkus, an emerging app that allowed
the restaurant to quickly manufacture its ideal crowd and pay the people
to stand in place like extras on a movie set.They’ve
even been hand-picked by a casting agent of sorts, an algorithmic one
that selects each person according to age, location, style and Facebook
“likes.”..

Welcome to the new world of “crowdcasting.” ...

The company’s tagline: “Go out. Have fun. Get paid.”

George
said the company has amassed 150,000 members in Los Angeles, New York,
Chicago, Miami and San Francisco. Anyone can download the app. The
members are of all ages and backgrounds, George said, noting that people
are drawn by the chance to be social and get paid.

After quietly
launching two years ago, Surkus members have attended 4,200 events for
750 clients, including big-name brands, hospitality groups,
live-ticketed shows, movie castings and everyday people who want to
throw a party. George said users can be paid as little as $5 and as much
as $100, though the average for most events is between $25 and $40.
Prolific users, he said, can earn as much as $4,000 a year.

Andre-Francois Raffray thought he had a great deal
30 years ago: He would pay a 90-year-old woman 2,500 francs (about $500)
a month until she died, then move into her grand apartment in a town
Vincent van Gogh once roamed.

But this Christmas, Mr. Raffray died at age 77,
having laid out the equivalent of more than $184,000 for an apartment he
never got to live in.

On the same day, Jeanne Calment, now listed in the
Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest person at 120, dined on
foie gras, duck thighs, cheese and chocolate cake at her nursing home
near the sought-after apartment in Arles, northwest of Marseilles in the
south of France...

Buying apartments "en viager," or "for life," is common in France. The
elderly owner gets to enjoy a monthly income from the buyer, who gambles
on getting a real estate bargain -- provided the owner dies in due
time...

I wonder if the public is aware that the cost of my first trial was
half a million dollars. Are they aware that the state has in place a
system that automatically delays my lawful murder for years, so that
pieces of the money pie can continue to be passed around? Is the public
aware that the chances of my lawful murder taking place in the next
twenty years, if ever, are very slim? Is the public aware that I am a
gentleman of leisure, watching color TV in the AC, reading, taking naps
at will, eating three well-balanced, hot meals a day? I’m housed in a
building that connects to the new $155 million hospital, with
round-the-clock free medical care.

There are a lot of good citizens who blogged on various websites,
stating their opinions about me and the punishment I deserve. I laugh at
you self-righteous clowns, and I spit in the face of your so-called
justice system. Kill me if you can, suckers! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Further details at Harper's, which had a better title for this item: "Fulsome Prison."

Birkeland will be a relatively small "feeder" cargo ship;
its journeys will be short jaunts down a fjord on Norway's Baltic Sea
coast from Yara's factory to a larger port. There, containers of
fertilizer will be loaded onto larger seagoing ships for international
transport. Currently, Yara ships these containers over land.

"Every day, more than 100 diesel truck journeys are needed to
transport products from Yara's Porsgrunn plant to ports in Brevik and
Larvik," Yara's president and CEO, Svein Tore Holsether, said in a
statement issued by the two companies. "With this new autonomous
battery-driven container vessel we move transport from road to sea and
thereby reduce noise and dust emissions, improve the safety of local
roads, and reduce nitrous oxide and CO2 emissions."

Naysayers will note that this development also eliminates jobs.

I read recently (??where???) an interesting commentary on our new robotic world. The writer noted that we are now reaching the future that was predicted (and lavishly praised) in our childhood - a world where drones and robots do the drudge-jobs, freeing humans from mindless labor and allowing us to redirect our time and energy to more rewarding tasks. But now, as this future arrives, it seems to be hurting the common man rather than being a benefit.

I believe the author postulated that the reason for the lack of improvement for ordinary people is that because of the structure of current economic systems, the benefits of automation only accrue to owners and management, not to employees.

I would like to find that essay, but I may have read it in a paper magazine (Atlantic, Harpers etc) rather than online.

08 August 2017

"What I had loaded thereon, the whole harvest of life
I caused to
embark upon the vessel; all my family and all my relations,The beasts
of the field, the cattle of the field, the craftsmen, I made them all
embark.I entered the vessel and closed the door...

When the young dawn gleamed forth,
From the foundations of heaven a black cloud arose...
All that is bright is turned into darkness,
The brother seeth his brother no more,
The folk of the skies can no longer recognise each other
The gods feared the flood,
They fled, they climbed into the heaven of Anu,
The gods crouched like a dog on the wall, they lay down...

For six days and nightsWind and flood marched on, the hurricane subdued the land.
When the seventh day dawned, the hurricane was abated, the flood
Which had waged war like an army;
the sea was stilled, the ill wind was calmed, the flood ceased.
I beheld the sea, its voice was silent,
And all mankind was turned into mud!
As high as the roofs reached the swamp;...

I beheld the world, the horizon of sea;
Twelve measures away an island emerged;Unto Mount Nitsir came the vessal,
Mount Nitsir held the vessal and let it not budge...When the seventh day came,
I sent forth a dove, I released it;
It went the dove, it came back,
As there was no place, it came back.
I sent forth a swallow, I released it;
It went the swallow, it came back,
As there was no place, it came back.
I sent forth a crow, I released it;
It went the crow, and beheld the subsidence of the waters;
It eats, it splashes about, it caws, it comes not back."

"You may read that the moon has something to do with eclipses. I have
never seen the moon yet. You do not see the moon. So near the sun, it is
as completely invisible as the stars are by day. What you see before
your eyes is the sun going through phases...

Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark
sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the
air... The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they
were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone
lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum
print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic;
their finish was matte...

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun
was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted
from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a
flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams.
At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped
over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly
it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a
tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin
ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the
arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.

It did not look like a dragon, although it looked more like a dragon
than the moon. It looked like a lens cover, or the lid of a pot. It
materialized out of thin air—black, and flat, and sliding, outlined in
flame... You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The
corona fills the print. All of those photographs were taken through
telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the
breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the
breadth and simultaneity of internal experience... But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky... It is one-360th part of the visible sky. The sun we see is less than half the diameter of a dime held at arm’s length...

I have said that I heard screams. (I
have since read that screaming, with hysteria, is a common reaction
even to expected total eclipses.) People on all the hillsides,
including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon
detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was
happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, which made
us scream.

The
second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come
speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder.
It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was
the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this
wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of
this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end
was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at
1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it,
and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of
anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time
to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up
your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood.
We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit."

Annie Dillard's essay was originally published in 1982. It will be available online at The Atlantic from now until August 21. I encourage you to read it there in toto. The essay makes me want to drive 5-6 hours to experience the totality in person.

• Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a
lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $15–$20 an hour. Lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue up.

The cynic in me thinks that the lobbyists pay the line-standing companies $15-20 an hour, but the line-standing companies hire the homeless at $2 an hour plus a free meal.

"Eva Knop’s team from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the
University of Bern, shows for the first time, that nocturnal pollinators
can be affected by artificial light leading to a disruption of the
pollination service they provide. “So far, nocturnal pollinators have
been largely neglected in the discussion of the worldwide known
pollinator crisis”... The study has now been published in the magazine “Nature”...

The team investigated a total of 100 cabbage thistles, which were
growing on five meadows experimentally illuminated with LED street
lamps, and five meadows without artificial light. The illuminated plants
were visited much more rarely by pollinating insects at night, than the
unlit plants. The decline in pollinators had a significant influence on
the reproduction of the cabbage thistles: at the end of the test phase,
the average number of fruits per plants was around 13% lower. “The
pollination during the day obviously cannot compensate for the losses in
the night”, says Knop."

A survey of data collected from 430 clinics across the UK reveals
arthritis, cancer, aggression and sloping backs are afflicting the breed
at higher rates than others due to aggressive selection. Nearly one in two German Shepherds is being put down because they are unable to walk, experts said...

The report follows an outcry at Crufts last year after a German Shepherd with an abnormally sloped back and painful looking gait won a “best in breed” prize...

Dr Dan O’Neill, who led the research, which is published in Canine
Genetics and Epidemiology, said a sloped back with shorter rear legs had
become a fashionable look for show dogs, and that this was influencing
breeding more widely.

An article in Vox will be of interest primarily to readers who have had a manuscript rejected (or have reviewed and rejected one) because a crucial p value was >0.05

Most casual readers of scientific research know that for
results to be declared “statistically significant,” they need to pass a
simple test. The answer to this test is called a p-value. And if your
p-value is less than .05 — bingo, you got yourself a statistically
significant result.

Now a group of 72 prominent statisticians, psychologists,
economists, sociologists, political scientists, biomedical researchers,
and others want to disrupt the status quo. A forthcoming paper in the journal Nature Human Behavior argues that results should only be deemed “statistically significant” if they pass a higher threshold.

“We propose a change to P< 0.005,” the authors write.
“This simple step would immediately improve the reproducibility of
scientific research in many fields.”...

The proposal has critics. One of them is Daniel Lakens, a
psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands
who is currently organizing a rebuttal paper with dozens of authors. Mainly, he says the significance proposal might work to stifle scientific progress.

How many statisticians does it take to ensure at least a 50 percent
chance of a disagreement about p-values? According to a tongue-in-cheek
assessment by statistician George Cobb of Mount Holyoke College,
the answer is two … or one. So it’s no surprise that when the American
Statistical Association gathered 26 experts to develop a consensus
statement on statistical significance and p-values, the discussion
quickly became heated.

It may sound crazy to get indignant over a scientific term that few
lay people have even heard of, but the consequences matter. The misuse
of the p-value can drive bad science (there was no disagreement over
that), and the consensus project was spurred by a growing worry that in
some scientific fields, p-values have become a litmus test for deciding
which studies are worthy of publication. As a result, research that
produces p-values that surpass an arbitrary threshold are more likely to
be published, while studies with greater or equal scientific importance
may remain in the file drawer, unseen by the scientific community.

This is a special book from the early Middle Ages (France, 9th century).
Not only does it contain a high volume of very attractive images, but
these images are also not what you would expect: they are drawn, as it
were, with words. They illustrate Cicero’s Aratea, a work of
astronomy. Each animal represents a constellation and the written words
in them are taken from an explanatory text by Hyginus (his Astronomica).
His words are crucial for these images because the drawings would not
exist without them. It is not often in medieval books that image and
text have such a symbiotic relationship, each depending on the other for
its very existence.

Image and text from Erik Kwakkel's excellent blog. At the link you will find five additional images of similarly-illustrated animals, and links to the digitized primary source and related materials.

Reposted from 2013 to note that the Public Domain Review has posted a gallery of sixteen of these "calligrams."

03 August 2017

With this post I'm inaugurating a new category in TYWKIWDBI - the locked-room mysteries of John Dickson Carr. I've been an avid reader of detective stories ever since my childhood discovery of Sherlock Holmes. College and graduate training consumed my time for a decade, but once I achieved gainful employment and a modicum of free time I resumed reading mysteries and science fiction. I believe it was in the 1980s when I lived in Kentucky that I read my first John Dickson Carr novel with an "impossible" murder. Over the next ten years I scoured the used bookstores of Lexington and Indianapolis to locate some of the more elusive titles. Finally, with the assistance of my wife and the internet I was able to acquire (and read) the corpus of about 70 titles.

Then I put them away. I had enjoyed them so much that I wanted to read them again, and I hoped that if enough time passed I would forget the clever plot devices that characterize this remarkable series. I carried the books with me to St. Louis and finally to Madison. Last week I decided that I'd better not wait too long to get started with the re-reading.

I decided to start with one of Carr's first works - It Walks By Night (1930). It features Inspector Bencolin - not as well known as Carr's more famous detectives Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. It also features an element familiar to readers of detective fiction of this era - a floor plan (embedded above). That diagram is essential to understanding and explaining the central mystery: a man was seen walking from the salon into the card room and moments later when Bencolin enters the room he finds a beheaded corpse. Nobody saw the murderer enter or leave that room. (In retrospect as I look at that floor plan the murderer's elusiveness is readily explicable...)

A pencilled note inside the cover of my well-worn copy indicates that I read it for the second time in 1983 and solved the "masquerade" - but not the identity of the murderer.

I've just finished re-rereading the book - and for the third time I was not able to predict the identity of the murderer. I consider this a good prognostic sign to indicate that I can now proceed to re-read the entire series with as much surprise and enjoyment as I garnered on previous occasions.

I originally rated the book 2+ (on my arbitrary scale of 0-4+), and I'll reaffirm that rating, while acknowledging that this was Carr's first novel.

For this series of posts I don't plan to offer any textual criticism, and certainly no spoilers. My intent is not to review the books so much as to write notes to myself regarding which ones to re-re-reread after another 30 years have passed...

As I usually do when I blog books, I'll excerpt a few interesting items:

"I expect the man at about eleven thirty o'clock." An uncommon usage (?antiquated, ?regional) which is probably not grammatically incorrect. It makes me wonder why we say "o'clock" at all if a statement clearly relates to time. "I'll be home at eleven (o'clock)."

It's not necessary for a mystery writer to be an accomplished wordsmith if they can spin a good story, but I do enjoy encountering a good turn of phrase, such as these-

"He pronounced the word "tourists" with all the fervid sadness and loathing with which Job must have said "boils."

"His face had the terrible triumph of Satan beholding at last the weakness in the armour of Michael..."

"I had a crazy impulse to laugh; he bore such a weird resemblance to William Jennings Bryan reading Darwin."

I was disappointed that Carr had Bencolin offering an unscientific appraisal of the evils of cannabinoids: "You note those brown dried leaves inside the tobacco? Marihuana or hashish, I think; I can't tell until our chemists analyse it. They eat green hashish leaves in Egypt; this is a deadlier variety from Mexico... It kills, you know, within five years. Somebody is most earnestly trying to do away with her."

Carr uses the word "tensity" (rather than "intensity") on several occasions ("a sense of rushing force and tensity, as though a car were hurtling to crash against a tree...)

"When we were returning along the road, he threw the light on his watch and whistled softly. 'Name of a name! it's half past one. I had no idea the hour was so late...'" That appears to be a mild curse, or an expletive. I don't know that I've seen it elsewhere, and a Google search yields nothing. Perhaps some reader can offer insight on the phrase. [addendum: answered in a reader comment]

02 August 2017

"In this documentary short titled Ten Meter Tower, Swedish filmmakers
Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson paid 67 people $30 to climb
to the top of a ten meter (33 foot) high dive for the very first time
all while being filmed. Would they decide to jump? Would they be too
scared? The resulting footage is surprisingly riveting as people slowly
come to terms with their fears and make a decision. It’s one thing to
admit defeat in private, but adding the cameras must add a near
insurmountable amount of pressure."

Rice: As with a lot of things in science, we stumbled upon this notion of Bird Friendly coffee. In the early 1990s, the then-director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center was conducting ornithological research in Mexico when he saw a distant “forest” across a valley that ended up actually being coffee grown beneath a diverse canopy cover of native trees. This “agroforest” was serving as viable habitat for birds, while still successfully growing coffee.

Marra: Coffee can be grown in sun or shade. It used to be grown in forests, where people would grow food and maintain a healthy habitat for wildlife at the same time. Coffee is a huge crop in terms of the amount of habitat it requires—not to mention it’s easier to harvest without trees around—so growers cut down the forests that many animals depend on. But it is possible to grow coffee in forests, with many benefits to animals, birds, and growers.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net